Life’s Carnival
Born in the Bronx in 1915, educated at Columbia University, Herman Wouk had a long literary run matched by very few. His specialty was historical fiction, but he veered from it several times. During WWII he served as an officer aboard two destroyer minesweepers and was awarded a number of battle stars. He wrote his first novel aboard a ship. Post-war, he wrote gags for legendary radio comedian Fred Allen. There are 22 titles listed at his Wiki profile. He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1952 for The Caine Mutiny, which he adapted into a Broadway play and which was so memorably brought to the screen in 1954. He received several other honors, including the Library of Congress Lifetime Achievement Award. Many of his works have been adapted to the big and small screen. He even made an appearance in The Winds of War (1983) mini-series in the uncredited role of The Archbishop of Siena. I’d never read any of his novels, deterred by the length of any that came my way. Since Corona had me housebound 22 hours a day for three months, I decided to give Don’t Stop the Carnival a crack, although I wasn’t thrilled with the title. It just goes to show how stupid I still can sometimes be. It is the story of a 49-year-old Manhattan publicist, tired of the rat race, who buys a small Caribbean hotel on the fictional isle of Amerigo, and the myriad problems that besiege him . He had me by the second page with this: “… all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much…” The prose is lively and witty, the dialogue is natural, and the characters have substance. My only quibble is there isn’t much more to the plot, until the end, than the problems of running a hotel. Published in 1965, there are aspects that may rankle the thin-skinned, such as the use of the word Negro and all the dated references, pejoratives describing gays. 35 years ago Wouk was not woke. That said, just about every character has a live-and-let live attitude. The 395 pages of the hardcover edition read like considerably less. It is refreshingly different from most novels. The title refers to a traditional song which has been recorded by Harry Belafonte, Jimmy Buffett and others. Three other readers have rated it at Amazon, each giving it a five. I gave it a four. Wouk passed away at 103 in 2019. Here is the artist as a young man:
The NY Post front page staff came up with another winner:
The baloney never ends, as this nypost.com headline illustrates: “NYC’s coronavirus contact tracers told not to ask if individual attended protests.”
Any hope that leadership change in North Korea would be a positive seems dashed. Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, seems just as dangerous as her brother.
What if the Seattle occupiers were a right wing group?
From Yahoo Sports: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced that he would be signing a law allowing college athletes to receive endorsement and sponsorship money. It will go into effect on July 1st, 2021. I have no objection to this, but I still believe college players should not be paid by their schools.
Day two of the floating book shop’s return was surprising. My thanks to Barry, who as usual overcompensated me for a work of non-fiction, in this case Comic Relief by Todd Gold and Bob Zumuda; and to the woman who bought six books in Russian; and to the one who purchased two on meditation and maps of the USA and the world; and to Romanian-born, bi-polar artist Andu, who came up Avenue Z shouting and asked to buy Killing. I imagine he will read a couple of pages, toss it aside and go on to something else.
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